Skirmishing Femininity: Female Populist Skirmishers and the Gendered Politics of Illiberalism in Hungary and Poland

Karolina Zbytniewska and Andrea Pető
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Karolina Zbytniewska: Democracy Institute, Central European University, Hungary / Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, Warsaw University, Poland
Andrea Pető: Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Austria

Politics and Governance, 2026, vol. 14

Abstract: This article explores the role of female political actors who mobilize gendered symbolic capital to advance illiberal populist agendas in contemporary Europe. Building on the concept of the populist skirmisher, we analyze women who act as combative and hypervisible disruptors of discursive norms. They engage in performative incivility—weaponizing confrontation, vulgarity, and taboo-breaking to command attention and push ideological boundaries. Focusing on emblematic figures: Poland’s Ewa Zajączkowska-Hernik and Hungary’s Dóra Dúró, we examine how these women operate through gendered repertoires of moral defense and cultural warfare. We argue that these women embody skirmishing femininity: a strategic mode of political agency that fuses protective traditionalism with disruptive communicative practices. Here, motherhood and femininity do not soften aggression but authorize it as moral protection. Their confrontational performances help redraw the boundaries of acceptable speech and normalize radical discourse.

Keywords: anti‐gender politics; femonationalism; illiberalism; motherhood; populist radical right; populist skirmishers; skirmishing femininity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v14:y:2026:a:12390

DOI: 10.17645/pag.12390

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